Still Enough of the Good Stuff
by Bexish
Summary: Paris spent a wonderful summer in London with Asher Fleming and came home with one more souvenir than she intended. Now Paris is newly single, dealing with classes and the Yale Daily News and (oops!) is pregnant. This story begins around the start of season four and follows Paris' sophomore year of college.


Author's note: I recently tried to write a similar story but my boyfriend gave me a better idea, so this is the new (hopefully improved!) Still Enough of The Good Stuff. The story title as well as the chapter titles come from Schuyler Fisk's song The Good Stuff, so don't be too bothered if the chapter titles have nothing to do what's going on in the chapter. Speaking of, this might be entirely too boring and free of character interaction for a first chapter, but I promise it will get more interesting!

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Paris was not looking forward to her sophomore year at Yale. At the beginning of the summer she couldn't wait to get back to school. While some people got runner's highs, Paris got a buzz from a particularly good study session or getting in a piece for the paper just before the deadline. She relished being the smartest person in the classroom and had once made a boy in her philosophy class (a class that was unfortunately required) cry. He had been sniffling as they walked out. She made sure to shake his hand and tell him there were no hard feelings there, but she rode on a wave of pride for the rest of the day. She had hoped that this year would be equally successful. Unfortunately, those hopes had been dashed two weeks before school started.

Traveling to London with Asher Fleming had been one of the best things to happen to Paris. Asher was amazingly smart and incredibly worldly in a way that Paris could only hope to be. When he asked her to accompany him when he went to teach in London it had been a dream come true. She got to spend three months with the man she loved in one of the most romantic cities in the world. Most people would say that Paris was the most romantic city in the world, but after being in London with Asher Paris (the person) had to disagree. She had learned so much about the city and was able to attend his brilliant lectures and on the weekends they would take day trips to other cities and eat fantastic foods and have amazing sex. It was the best time of her life.

Being in another country wasn't entirely easy though. For instance, Paris had regretfully decided not to get her birth control prescription refilled for the amount of time that she was going to be in London. Paris wasn't an idiot so of course she practiced safe sex, but it wasn't quite as safe without those special little pills. Three weeks before she was supposed to fly home for school she found out that she was pregnant in the bathroom of a Boots. At first she was ambivalent about the whole thing. Asher was considerably older than her and already had kids, grandkids even, so Paris thought that he would be fine with her terminating the pregnancy when they got home. Paris certainly didn't want to spend her sophomore year of college with a parasite sapping all her energy and dictating the kinds of foods she ate and how she was supposed to live her life. Suppose sophomore year was the year she decided to take up smoking or binge drinking? She wouldn't be able to do that if she was with child. So the decision was made as soon as the little screen flashed "pregnant".

Paris hadn't told Asher that night, which was her first mistake. Having decided that terminating the pregnancy was the smartest thing to do, she was feeling rather calm about the situation. At dinner that night the two of them discussed the class he was teaching and how much better chocolate was in Europe and Paris even had a glass of wine. The whole night seemed so normal that telling Asher really did just slip her mind. Her next mistake came the next day, when she neglected to tell him again. And the day after that. And the day following that one. Before she knew it, a week had gone by and she hadn't mentioned the fact that she was carrying what could potentially be part of the next generation of Flemings. And then the bomb dropped.

During a recitation of an excerpt from A Midsummer Night's Dream, Asher had a heart attack. Within five minutes, he was dead. Paris, of course, had been the only sane person in the room. Those other imbeciles had thought he was acting. If anyone of them had ever bothered to read or hell, even _watch _A Midsummer Night's Dream, they would have known that Puck didn't die in the play. No one could have helped Asher, but the way the fifty students he was speaking to reacted made Paris want to go back to the United States and never come back. London may have been culturally rich and wonderful, but the students there were, as they would say, incredibly thick.

When Paris was back in his apartment, alone, trying to sort through his effects she just felt empty. She had loved her first boyfriend, but that was nothing compared to how she felt about Asher. For someone who was so logical and couldn't be bothered with flimsy buzzwords like "soul mates", she had truly thought that she and Asher had shared something deeply special. Magical, even, if that was something that existed. Very few people knew about their relationship and those who did didn't understand it. She knew Rory couldn't figure out why Paris wanted to be with someone forty years her senior, but Paris had never felt the need to explain their relationship much. They understood each other on a level that very few people ever experienced. After witnessing her own parents' horrible marriage, Paris was sure that Asher could redeem her feelings about love and marriage. If he had asked her to marry him, she would have said yes in an instant. Instead, she was alone, surrounded by his belongings and fielding phone calls left and right from his family about who got what. She couldn't even tell them who she was. She had to pretend she was the assistant of someone helping to settle his estate. All she had left of him was his pipe, an antique printing press that he left her and a tiny blob of cells that contained his DNA.

For a moment, she considered not even going back to school. What did it matter, really? Asher was a brilliant professor and had more degrees than anyone she knew and he had still been cut down in the prime of his life. So what if she became a doctor or a lawyer? She could still die at any minute and all that work would have been for nothing, especially since she was convinced that now she would end up dying alone. Paris was perfectly happy to wallow in Asher's apartment, just breathing in the smell of him and pretending the real world didn't exist. It was only when Rory called her on move-in day that she decided she should get back to school. If Rory hadn't called her, she would have assumed that no one there called at all.

So, with only two days left until the start of fall classes and a growing sense of dread, Paris boarded a plane home alone. Well, almost alone. While she napped on the plane, she was haunted by vague dreams filled with regret. She should have told him. And now she would never get the chance.


End file.
